This is what i did yesterday.

Work from 6-1. Lunch with L from 1-3. Scanned two dozen slides from my cross-country trip. Went out for Mexican food with K. Had a single solitary margarita. Got drunk. Went to a large Barnes & Noble, leafed through some magazines on creative writing (booo) photo editing and a collection of photographs from Life magazine. Went home to my temporary home. Watched four episodes of How I Met Your Mother. wrote this post:

“Reach out and touch someone”

there must be a better word for it. infatuation sounds so petty, wonder sounds so bland, everything being alight sounds so New Age i want to put on Yanni and aroma-euthanize myself.

but anytime everything’s on fire and you beg for someone to just acknowledge that it is so, and no one seems to have an inkling of what it is you’re on about or what you want from them (do i?), well apart from certain expletives born of frustration, that good old AT&T slogan comes to mind.

Then I went to bed.

How did any of that lead to me dreaming about a couple of quarreling lesbian train conductors who abandon me at the control post of a speeding train just when the tracks suddenly become so much entwined and diverging spaghetti? And when i finally take a wrong fork in the track and bring the train to a grinding halt, the chief lesbian conductor comes out and screams at me and then proceeds to make out with me, or rather, chew on my lower lip in a very unrelenting way.

How then did the dream segue into me being part of some extreme family gang lead by my father, with members ranging from my brother to other cousins, and us killing at least five people in gruesome ways and having the cops show up the second we do away with our last victim, in the filthy laundry room of our house which incidentally has an open screen door that the cops simply sidle up to as we go about our murderous business?

is it the tequila? or the salsa? a combination of both? the carrot cake i had yesterday afternoon?

Or was it all about, um… finality?

Scene 1.

I am a knight in some king’s court. Except the court is on the flat roof of a tall building surrounded by many many many other buildings, close enough together to almost jump from one to the next and they are all of slightly varying heights. All of them are made of red bricks and the rooftops are all square, like the tops of stone towers, and it seems like we live in perpetual sunset, as everything is warm and orange or yellow tinged. People are trying to kill the king and i succeed in defending him for a time but then he dies. It is made clear that many years pass and we still live on the rooftop but the king’s court (all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…) have faded faded are gone and now they are after M instead. And I run from rooftop to rooftop trying to catch up to M to protect her but they are also after me, trying to hold me back, and there is much jumping to a ladder and climbing and nearly falling and grasping the edge of a roof and clambering over the ledge and running and jumping and fist-fighting and struggling and some of the pursuants are enemies and others are people i’ve known as friends or colleagues (in particular i know that one of the ring-leaders is Nicholas V, I have a clear shot of him using an old flip-open black motorola star tac to tell his accomplices where we are) and finally they catch up to M and I, and M is with her six daughters (WTF???) and they cram us into a cinderella horsedrawn carriage (without the horses or wheels, like a huge baby carriage) and then pull out machetes and proceed to butcher us all. I do not see or feel the actual dismembering but only the blood-spattered walls of the carriage and as the scene fades there is no longer an orange glow but rather a blueish-purple tint to things, the light, the silk walls of the carriage, the blood and barely visible body parts.

Scene 2.

As self-awareness perdures beyond being macheted, a switch occurs to allow for our non-death. We get up and leave a large cineplex kind of movie theater and take a long escalator down and exit onto a cobbled street not unlike the Rue de la Confédération in Geneva, except we are in Paris. We get on the tram and it takes us in what I am sure is the wrong direction, we want to exit the city and get back to the parking lot but we’re instead heading into what I tell M is the French Quarter (i suppose i meant the Latin Quarter) and it is quaint and filled with small Pâtisseries and Boulangeries, and all the store awnings have the floral curls and pastel tones of Art Nouveau and Mucha posters. We get off the tram and enter a very very large bakery that inside is actually a supermarket. M goes off in one direction and i in another, searching for a baguette. I run into M’s Mom and two of her friends. One is tall and wears a leopard-skin coat and large-brimmed hat and upon shaking my hand, after i introduce myself, tells me in a vexed way that we’ve met before. The other friend is shorter and wearing a deep crimson or purple satin coat and her lipstick is dark purple, like Chanel’s Rouge Noir nail polish, and her upper lip is huge, and the surface of it fascinates me because it looks exactly like the flesh of a grapefruit. I tell M’s Mom to follow me, i’ll take her to M but i can’t find M anywhere, she’s probably floating aimlessly around the store and I am very annoyed. When I finally locate her, near a cash register, it takes forever to get close to her, struggling to get my dreamself to move forward, and because this is drawing a lot of my concentration, the three ladies behind me keep fading, so I have to continuously turn back and forth between M and her Mom to make sure to keep them both in focus so i can bring them together. But when i finally get to M, her Mom has disappeared and i am angry.

Scene 3.

I woke up briefly this morning when M’s alarm went off and then fell back asleep.

I am in M’s Mom’s car (let’s call her MM), and we are driving up a winding road heading into the Alps, to some village that is an amalgamation of Verbier and Grindelwald and Wengen. As we are getting there, the landscape, which was sunny and warm turns to white. Everything is covered in at least three feet of snow and we hear over the radio that the auto show in Geneva has been cancelled because everything is snowed in. I am uptight because i know that spending a weekend alone with MM without M there will be challenging because i have a way of clumsily setting MM off, and also because it means i will be sleeping alone in the bunk bed that is in the children’s room of the chalet where we are headed, and as the chalet is nearly barren and barely heated i will be freezing (the chalet is a cross between the room D and i slept in as kids at RS’s, and S’s place in St Cergue). As we get into the village we decide, because of the harsh conditions, to go into one of the shops that are still open and get some supplies. It is a typical alpine tea-room crossed with a boulangerie, with one room filled with small round tables and chairs and another where the counter and cash-register are, with the breads on display behind the counter. MM goes off to pick out her supplies and I go over to the owner of the place who is also running the register. I want to buy jam for breakfast. This is all-important. I go to buy plum jam but the jar i pick up off the shelf has the small paper seal already torn, meaning it has been opened. So i go to the owner and ask her if i can have a new unopened one. She makes a slightly annoyed face but goes downstairs to get one. She returns with a jar of the plum jam but as i turn it over i see that the expiry date is 04/2003. So i give it back to her and ask her for another one. She tells me there are none left. So i ask her for a jar of cherry, and as she goes down the stairs she turns and asks me what flavor i want and i say “cherry” or “cerise” (funnily enough i have no notion of the general language i am speaking in this specific dream), and she looks confused, so i say “Kirschen” and she nods and goes downstairs and returns with a small jar of black cherry jam, but the paper seal is again broken and i am getting desperate and the owner ever more annoyed, but i ask her for another one and she tells me there is no cherry left, so i decide to totally switch and ask her if she has any lemon marmelade. I like the British type with bits of skin inside. And she says yes and goes downstairs and returns with a jar of something that resembles lemon marmelade but when she hands it to me and i turn it over i see from the label that it is in fact banana and nuts, and i hate bananas in anything but their natural state, and even then they must be perfect. So i finally don’t have the courage to ask her for another jar of something and i put the jar on the counter and apologize and turn to leave, and just then T arrives (because for some reason she has replaced MM) and we head back out to her two-seater sports car, and the weather is no longer a snow-covered scene but a summery orange late afternoon, as in Scenes 1 and 2. And it takes me forever to drag myself out of sleep and as i sit here typing this two hours later, i know it is going to be one of those days when you carry the slight anxiety of the dream with you, feeling just slightly slow and maybe behind or beside the regular flow of things.

So I’m up on a lit stage in an empty darkened theater, the large balconied red-velvety kind, and there are a few of us rehearsing a scene. There is a huge (man-sized or more) brown rock on stage and it is on stilts so it is about a meter and a half off the ground. One of the “cast”, a samoan wrestler type, comes over to the rock and says “watch this” and proceeds to karate-chop it, and it cracks down the center but remains on the stilts. And then, with a huge groaning, the rock spreads apart and raises itself up to its full height and reveals a huge gaping mouth and eyes. And I start mimicking the monster, which is a slow groaning grumbling mass of rock. I walk around the stage in slow-motion, arms and legs bowed and hanging like an ape, and in a deep and slow voice start saying things like “arrrrgh…i aaaam a moooonsterrrr…”. And the teacher, sitting in the front row says “hey guys, i think andrew’s imitating the monster”. Then i realize that what i’m doing is probably a bad idea, and this is where the dreams switches to video-game mode. I dart from the stage and enter an underground passage from the area directly behind the curtain, running like a madman, jumping stairs, swinging over pits, always down, down, down into the dungeon-like darkness, some obscure indeterminate maleficence pursuing me. At this point, as dream realities are prone to do, everything shifts, including my recollection of prior circumstance. I am no longer running from a rock monster on a stage but am engaged in the rush towards the exits that always follows the end of an RHCP show (should i mention i’ve never been to one?) and it involves dodging other kids running and still jumping stairs down into darkness and running along dank flagstoned corridors, and while i’m running i am remembering that this is a dream i used to have in high school all the time (except i didn’t, more reverse chronology) and i therefore know what’s next, the last obstacle betweent the exit and I is a sort of minotaur that is never seen, only heard breathing in a huffing taurean manner, always just behind you or around the next corner, and i nearly run smack dab into him and so he is now alerted to my presence. And i run, and run, and finally i turn and see stairs rising in total obscurity and i dash up them, the minotaur in hot pursuit, and i wake up. And as i am lying there feeling terrible because i have had this old new dream i’ve never had/had many times before, trying to get my breath back, the elastic corner of the bedsheet rolls up off the mattress and slaps me in the face.

So i’m in a supermarket with M. walking around and we bump into G., a friend of her’s, and he’s carrying what looks like an aluminum or iron backpack with a big tracheal tube coming out of it, and he’s breathing through it, because he has tuberculosis. And so i back up because tb is contagious and since it’s relatively incurable, catching it would suck. But M. just sort of stands around and i mention that maybe she shouldn’t get too close to him and she looks at me with that maddening air of defiance she gets when it’s a matter of standing up to me on principal rather than reason, and she asks if she can try breathing out of his backpack, and he hands her the end of the big tube he’s breathing through (at its end it’s about as wide as those tubes you blow really hard into to test your respiratory capacity) and i start seriously asking her to please not breath through that thing because i’d really rather the person it looks like i’m going to spend the rest of my life with didn’t pick up tb just for fun, but she just waves me off and says she doesn’t care that he’s sick, she’s not gonna catch it, and she clamps her lips around the end of the tube and takes a deeeeeeeep breath… and that’s that.

So i’m working on the set of Splash. And Stephen Spielberg is directing (?). And Luis Guzman is co-starring (???). And i’m following the action and at one point i notice a bad, fifties’ style cut, where in one frame things are positioned one way, and poof the cut jumps you to a point supposedly contiguous in time but everything’s position is off… So i start rewinding and then forwarding frame by frame to see if my eye did catch a bad cut. The problem is, since it’s only one frame, if you blink, you miss it. Plus, since i’m actually in the action whilst doing this (holding either a B camera or a boom or something) i’m having a hard time finding the point where the cut takes place, and so i’m walking forward then back, forward then back, looking obsessively and (i hope) unblinkingly at these black electrical cables on the floor, because they’re what skipped.

And Stephen is getting pretty annoyed, what with me going back and forth back and forth. He’ like to get on with the show. So i quit futzing around and step out onto a balcony and start chatting with Luis, and we somehow get to the subject of money and he basically starts whining that i may think he has money, even though (as an actor who has a majority of secondary roles, in independent productions) not as much as A-list actors, since he plays in lot of movies, but actually it’s all gone, he’s lost or spent it all and he has four kids at home and what’s he going to do, boohoohoo… And i try to comfort him by telling him what a great actor he is, or at least that i really enjoy watching him on screen.

PS: for some reason, instead of the set for Splash, it seems we’re on the set for Legend. The balcony we’re on looks out on a fairytale mountain stream, surrounded by pines and large white boulders, and in the distance, Tom Cruise is preparing to dive off a boulder into the deep pure water, looking for his princess.

It’s been more than a day so i can’t be very precise. But for the sake of cataloguing here it is:

A house with five floors seen from the outside. It’s like a doll house in that the exterior wall that would normally mask the contents from view is removed.

On each floor a brother*. My room is under the roof on the fifth floor. POV is far enough back that we can see the house is in a very flat and green plain. The weather is july thunder storm black.

Something went wrong and i don’t know what. I apparently went on some kind of rampage, or something, if not me, went through the house floor to floor. Either way i was responsible for whatever had happened. On the second floor, we can see D. discover that M. (another M), his girlfriend, has been raped. Faced with the shame and ignominy of it, she kills herself, and he threatens to kill himself or me.

I’m locked in my fifth-floor room, feeling terrible guilt and sadness for the hate i’ve caused in D. I am contemplating the following: either i go to jail for life and every day face the unbearable consequences of my actions, or i kill myself and everyone in the house to cut this gordian knot, clear the slate, efface what can not be undone.

Upon waking i was very sad, and above all couldn’t help but dwell on the feeling of having crossed the line, beyond which there is no going back, nothing will ever be the same or ok again.

I often wonder where that line stands. Or more importantly, i wonder how you react once you cross it. I feel very anxious at the idea of doing something irreparable. Just this feeling that beyond that point, it’s all interior violence and screaming. Chaos, sadness and exile.

* Of all these brothers, only one exists, D.

Every day for the last couple of weeks, as i walk past the local video store on my way to the library, i notice the poster for “13 going on 30″ starring jennifer garner in the window. The movie looks like absolute shit, but one thing that i can’t help noticing, in the half second as i walk by, is that jennifer Garner’s big toe is about 2.5 inches long, and her perfectly pedicured nail is also about that length.

And as i walked by the poster this morning, i broke out laughing in the middle of the street. Because last night i dreamt that Jennifer showed up at our house (we don’t own a house, but in this dream i was living in one with my brother). And she proceeded to strip and get in the shower. Two things of interest: 1. It was one of those old bathrooms with white tile, an enormous bathtub with feet, and no shower curtain… so D. just sort of stood their watching our rather shapely guest shower wearing nothing but a white grandmother’s shower cap. 2. Jennifer left her feet outside. So while she was in the shower, i picked up her left foot and proceeded to clip her big toe’s nail. Because it wasn’t the perfectly pedicured nail from the poster but a troll’s nail, fanning out after the toe’s edge in a semi-circle of yellowness. Unfortunately, i was using the broken nail-clippers i have at home. They don’t cover the width of a nail and because of their curvature, it’s impossible to cut a nail straight. And as if that isn’t bad enough, i split the nail all the way down it’s middle. And as i hear Jennifer coming out of the shower, i desperately peel back layer after layer of split nail, in an attempt to mask the irreparable damage i’ve done…

And how did you sleep?

So we’re on an island, the size of Isla Whatever in Jurassic Park, and it’s impossible to see what everything looks like because it’s always either sunrise or sunset. It’s all mud and dense foliage but a lot of the island has been “civilized” as in built on. There are many structures that look like 19th century Mexican monasteries strewn along the high parts of the island like the villages on Santorini.

As tourists traveling on a budget, we’re not staying in a fancy hotel. Instead, we’re going to sleep in the traditional Ipachachi way.

The Ipachachi are the local tribe and look a lot like the tribe in the Emerald Forest, replete with canoes and little poison blow-darts.

Their traditional dwellings are off the beaten path, in the forest. They have, over centuries, carved long swaths out of the forest, and the alleyways resemble the waterways on rides at Epcot center, meaning canals closed off on four sides, in the sense that, even though the foliage has been cut away, the canopy is so dense that you barely know if it’s night or day, so you never know exactly where you are. There is only straight ahead and back.

We travel these waterways by means of an orange inflatable zodiac-type boat. Most of use sit around, a couple of guys paddle.

As to the accommodations themselves, every once in awhile you will come upon an opening on your left or right and there will be no water, just a mud floor. These “rooms” are either inhabited by natives, or can be used by tourists.

I think there are between six and twelve of us.

The only people I remember though are M & S.

The problem with the natives is twofold: first, they are constantly at war with one another, and traveling the “canals” is hazardous because you constantly get caught in the middle of an aquatic poisonous dart fight; secondly, there is the unconfirmed fear that the natives are cannibals, or at least, will not hesitate to kill whitey just for being around. That being said, some of them seem friendly enough.

So one day around sunset, our boat flips over, and when we turn it back over everyone except M & S are gone. We get a little tense and worried as finding our home base through the winding maze of canals is very difficult. After some time of apparently going around in circles, M & S insist that we have to go one way, and I insist we go another. After five minutes of stubborn squabbling they go off on the path leading down to the beach, and I set off back into the jungle.

After two wrong turns and one close call with the natives, I reach the end of this particular corridor and our home base is nowhere in sight. Instead, the jungle and the water taper off and become, at the very end of the corridor, a high-school hallway with three doors.

One says “Policia local”, the other two signs are rusted almost bare but I can read “Privat” and “Keep out”. I open the “Policia” door, which was more hanging on its hinges than actually shut. Inside are four people, three men and one woman. She’s dressed in more of a Village People / S & M police outfit.

They all make fun of me for losing my way. And then the lady shushes them and agrees to accompany me, at least part of the way. We get on a bus, a NY pneumatic-doored modern bus, and start driving along wet neon city streets. We’re idly chatting and the subject of the policewoman’s actual profession comes up. She’s really a dominatrix (hmm… maybe the clothes should’ve have clued me in…). The girl she’s sitting next to giggles, and I capitalize on the joyous mood by continuing the risqué subject matter, expounding on the fact that some women love it when you come on their back (???). Everyone’s laughing and chatting and suddenly S, who’s apparently with us again, draws me into the stairwell of the nearest exit and asks me to kiss her, in that pouty-lipped way she has.

Cut to a beach in Fort Lauderdale. I’m with Daniel (my brother) and we’ve just traveled back in time to 1964 or 1965. Out on the pier, they’re having a JRR Tolkien memorabilia sale. Daniel and I realize that since we can travel into the past, we can know all the lottery numbers and get rich (not that that makes sense…). And since we’re rich, we can buy all sorts of JRR original stuff and come back to sell it in 2004! And get even richer!

So we walk out to the end of the pier and there, nearly overhanging the water, is the prize object of the collection, a 120 kg. 5 ft. x 3 ft. Lord of the Rings edition. Complete with color illustrations and “505th printing” stamped in gold lettering at the bottom of the dust cover. And it costs 5000 and some-odd $. The guy helps us leaf through it, and it is half in Hebrew / half in English, in the sense that it resembles the glosses of roman jurists: the main text is in Hebrew and the surrounding commentary is in English.

In the end we decide not to buy it though, as the pages inside are actually just enlarged photocopies of the smaller edition, and therefore barely legible. It’s embarrassing to leave the guy like that so I slip him 20 CHF i have from the future, where I’m now rich.

Cut back to Isla Whatever.

Nighttime. We’re walking along the streets of one of the Cliffside towns. I want to cash in my lottery ticket (which, logically, should have the winning numbers, since I’ve brought it from the Past…).

So we walk into one of the street-side cafés and I hand the lottery ticket to a thin Diego Maradonna mustachioed guy who’s busy talking to his mother and voluntarily (I’m certain) pretends not to pay attention to what he’s doing when I hand him my ticket and he crumples it in his hand along with the other non-winning tickets he has! I’m sure he knows I have the winning ticket! And I tell him he didn’t pass the ticket through the machine and he feigns indignation and anger and tells me yes he has and hands me a ticket from his crumpled hand and I know it’s not mine… I’ve been cheated of a total jackpot of 5 million golden rupieros (the local currency). And I’ve been awake too long and the rest of the dream has faded.

I don’t think any of the above has any particular significance. Just a sleeping mind riffing on snapshots from waking days. I do wonder however what it means when you start bringing back things like words. That never happened before this Spring. Lack of spinach maybe?

Okey-dokey. So this one was pretty interesting:

It’s sometime in the early evening in Florida, and i drive out to a strip mall in a pickup with my dad and two brothers (though i only have one brother, but hey, who’s counting?). We’re meeting Britney there for a bite to eat. So we pull in to the parking lot and Britney’s assistant drives her up in a minivan, and we settle down at the table that’s already been set up for us. In the parking lot. Maybe it’s the floridian strip-mall version of a VIP lounge… It’s true that we’re all alone and no hordes of screaming fans are bothering us. Britney immediately starts spouting an inordinate amount of ridiculous shit, very reminiscent of the blond airhead actress in LiT. And as she orders just about everything on the menu, she keeps moaning about how fat she’s gotten.

At some point, a Winnebago drives by on the street and comes to a skidding halt a few yards further down. Apparently we’ve been spotted. As i try to hide britney’s and my brother’s faces with their menus (it would seem that my second brother, the one that doesn’t actually exist, also happens to be famous in this dream), the Winnebago drives by a second time, and then pulls over on the sidewalk. Pissed off, D. (my existing sibling) goes and hides behind the hedge separating the mall’s lot from the sidewalk, waiting to spring out and scare the shit out of the annoying gawkers about to show up. Unfortunately he times his terror-leap poorly and only succeeds in nearly bowling over a few elderly ladies and a couple with a baby. The three Winnebagans finally show themselves. They’re your typical chunky college jock type and they start actually heckling us, instead of fawning over her royal britness. Luckily D., that master of repartie, says that although what they’re saying about us might be true, at least none of us are wearing a pink and blue Oxbow* sweatshirt. Bam! That really shuts them up. The suggestion that jock n° 2 is wearing a gay sweatshirt** just shocks them into silence . With that taken care of, we all start chatting away in a friendly manner, discussing this and that, and munching away at our burgers. But then, in mid-sentence, Britney says “yeah man, i mean, grainful sudation, wow, you know?”. And everything comes to a screeching halt. Utter Staring Silence. WTF? And as if to prove that we’d all heard correctly, there is an actual cut in the dream to a black background with the words grainful sudation flashing in 72 pt. white type. The moment is so intense, i start to wake up, and as i rise slowly through layers of consciousness, i hear Britney repeating those two words throughout the evening, as if they actually meant something. Then i’m awake and rushing to my pc.

Because either i simply accept what’s immediately apparent - i.e that Britney is a dumb shit and maybe meant gainful employment or grateful uhmm… sudation? - or i freak out at the possibility that this was maybe a message from beyond. Grainful Sudation man, it rings true man, like, ah, umm, a mantra or something. Just say it, Grainful Sudation. And why would i remember it so perfectly, to the point where it actually flashed neon-big in the dream, if it wasn’t important? If it was just random dream mumbles and onomatopoeia, it would have just faded along with Britney’s Burgers into the oblivion of dreams past. Right? Like Richard Dreyfuss’ mound of mashed potatoes, this means something. I’m open to suggestions. Any ideas? You there, in the back, speak up.

*To You who do not live in France or Switzerland: Oxbow over here is also a sportswear manufacturer, especially renowned for their enormously thick and heavy snowboarding or skiing sweatshirts.
** For reasons inherent to dream symbolism, i unfortunately cannot explain why all of a sudden Oxbow clothing is the Kylie Minogue of sportswear.

In the land of darkness
where seeing is eyes closed
i was made to confess

nothing as it seems
unraveling as we speak
as i stitch and mend

the truth i wouldn’t see
forced upon me
for the good of whom?

Unfortunately this is being transcribed several hours after waking so it’s already a little fuzzy.

essentially, we’re on a beach, the sand that of the flat plain-like beaches of France, but the ocean is Floridian, before a storm, dark green tumult. The air is heavy summer humid and the sky is a thick dark swirl of building clouds. I’m taking pictures of them and what i remember now is seeing the resulting snapshots. R, M , S and a horse (?!?), floating 15 feet from the ground, pushed up against the sky. The backlighting gives them a silver lining. Other shots of them on the beach. I don’t know why the horse is there. The storm comes, beats down on us, shreds the beach. As it lifts, leaving sandy puddles and torn dunes behind, i happen upon I’s diary. Written inside the back cover i discover, in pencil, a sketch of a letter intended for me that she never sent. Asking for a kiss, saying i’m still on her mind. My feeling in the dream is relief, satisfaction, not regret - because we weren’t meant to be - at knowing i wasn’t simply erased from her life as easily as chalk from a blackboard

This is pretty much what the weather and the horse looked like. not that i remember seeing this specific dali anytime in the past years.

so johnny depp comes over to my place for drinks. and as we’re sitting there, he in his half-timid way, me trying nonchalantly to make small talk, he starts looking around my 12 by 12 ft. studio and comes across a flat rectangular tin that once held amaretti i brought back from Rome. He opens it and inside are two identical spring-leaf green rattlesnakes. I’ve totally forgotten i had them there and haven’t fed them in months. They both slither out of the tin and while johnny and i struggle with one of them, trying to not get fanged to death, the other crawls up to a crack in the wall and disappears inside. Johnny runs over and grabs it by its tail, brings it back out hissing and snapping. We finally get them back in the tin and i start johnny on the subject of guitars, since i’d really love to play a blues with him. Unfortunately, the following happens in rapid succession: he spills his whisky and coke (why in hell would anyone be drinking a whisky and coke?) and the glass explodes on my floor spraying my guitar and clothes and couch with this sticky brown liquid, and i’m suddenly in the lobby of an enormous, dark and dingy hotel, surrounded by aunts and uncles and grandparents, and many elderly people in wheelchairs and my mother is shouting at me that i’m late, where the hell have i been, everybody has been waiting for me before leaving for some relative’s birthday feast.

So i’m in an H&M dressing room to try on a pair of jeans and as i bend down to pull them on i suddenly have a very bad vibe, to the extent that i get dizzy and nauseous, and i remember that recently some terrorist group had someone killed by way of a dressing room bomb, which is sort of like a car bomb, except that it detonates when you lock the dressing room door. And at the same time i know with perfect clarity that the person in the cabin next to mine is a Spanish or a Latin-American diplomat, and my inner voice is screaming for me to get the hell out of there, with or without pants on, and the rational me, the morbidly curious me, says, nahhh, you know it ain’t gonna happen, but still, it’s like a déjà -vu when i hear the click of the lock and the hollow “whumph!” heard in every landmine scene in every Vietnam movie ever made and i get dowsed in blood and bile, and some intestines slam into the panel in front of me and start slowly crawling down into my line of sight, which i’ve been keeping as low as possible, specifically so as not to see anything, and i’m saying to myself “damn, i really am precognizant, which means that every stupid bad vibe i get i’ll have to take seriously”, and i step outside and i am in the studio of a local alternative radio-station and the DJ wants to interview me although i tell him i smell like the inside of someone’s stomach and can’t he see i’m drenched in blood? And then my alarm goes off and it’s seven am…blah…blah…blah…

(written at 4:30 a.m, eyes half-closed, sitting up in my bed in a sweltering room in a house on a cliff near the sea in Spain in August, every hair on my body standing on end)

Ok the house in Spain is haunted, permanently bad-vibed i don’t know. Two nights in a row i’ve had horribly vivid nightmares shortly after falling asleep. Usually nightmares don’t pick up exactly where your day left off, except in grade B movies, but these…

I awoke last night and the painting on the wall on the right side of the room, by day a plain painting of a ship on a naive blue sea, was filled with an eerie yellowish light and the face of a woman moving. I sat up with a gasp and switched on the light and dispelled the illusion.

Tonight, shortly after falling asleep, i dreamt that out the window on my side of the bed i could see the roof lights of an ambulance flashing. No sound though. Near the ambulance, but nearer to my window, another car, with a pregnant woman on the hood giving birth. As i get up and walk onto the terrace towards the ambulance, its passengers, dressed in 2001 retro-futuristic garb, start a) talking french, and b) shooting at me with ray-guns.

I manage, rolling through the bushes and tall grass on the lawn, to avoid their shots. Their Future car drives off and i walk towards the woman who was giving birth. She is a mulatto and no longer giving birth. She is standing with one or two boys, black, their bodies close in size to those of ten year-olds. One of them approaches me, lays his hands on my shoulders but then squeezes in an insistent manner. He comes closer and closer to me and he will not release his grip. He keeps saying “Dimuk” or “Kimuk” and he stares at me with uncommon understanding in his eyes. They are more gray than brown and the pupil is slit like a cat’s. He is not human. His teeth, though his body looks ten, are not all there. His mouth is deformed and his cheeks cave in more and more as the dream goes on. I wake up.

What amazes me is that the above sounds like so much bullshit but is actually as close as i can get to accurately transcribing the two dreams. What flips me out is the horrible sense of foreboding that washes over me when i think about them, and the fact that even now, back in Geneva, i still shiver.

I’ve had underwater dreams where i wake up and realize i’ve been actually holding my breath. I’ve had the standard dreams of women i’ve never pictured having a relationship with where you wake and then spend the day believing something actually did or is going to happen. I’ve had dreams so real I almost cried with relief upon realizing nothing i dreamt actually happened. But i’ve never woken from a dream physically shaking, feeling that I was being watched, that the participants were actually still around me after it ended, that something bad was basically looking over my shoulder, when i was writing the dreams down, sitting up in bed, and now preparing an electronic version of them, it just brings them back and i can’t help feeling th

It’s the difference between a thirty-second flash of you running towards an inescapable cliff, fanged carrots in hot pursuit, and a three-hour drama in Panavision and Technicolor where you can smell the smells, taste the tastes, feel the fear and longing, not as something you know is only dream state reality but something altogether different because you’re actually there. And you can’t wake up because you don’t know you’re sleeping.

There’s no way to explain why because it starts well into the first act, but we’re being deported again. Then again, the whole point is there is no valid explanation. It’s something that’s happening, and the only reason it is allowed to go on is that all participants are caught up in the absence of critical thought caused by inevitable History grinding along its tracks.

The Swiss authorities stand by and watch, as they are prone to in these circumstances. Everyone just stands by and watches. Even M seems to accept the fact with a total lack of surprise or sadness. Once we are again separated from the masses, set aside from normality because of what we are, non-Jews lose their capacity for empathy because we no longer are part of their group. For the same reason we don’t really feel the suffering of cows off to the slaughterhouse.

The general setting is quite obviously inflected by my recently reading the Pianist, everything is washed out greys and olive greens, a sort of November rendering of mid-countryside landscape.

We are being deported, but have been invited to come to the station of our own free will and I am therefore in the process of trying, in a fifteen-minute time span, to set my affairs in order before going away. When you have so little time to reason twenty-six years of life, your priorities surface rapidly, even if they are only dream priorities.

So I make sure to send the members of my rock group a sealed envelope containing the address of the group’s website and the login and password information, as well as the same information for my personal site, containing most of what I consider to be my “important” writing. Then I send various other letters and set aside the papers containing my poems etc…

As I said, dreams have a tendency of randomizing your priorities. Although I get in touch with my father and brother, my mother is left out of the picture completely and I don’t worry about her until I’m on the train, realizing I don’t know where she is or what has become of her. My feeling is that this apparent lack of love or gratitude on my part is only caused by the absence of conflict in my relationship to my mother, whereas the tension between my brother, my father and myself is a constant cause of worry.

So I’m at the station, which actually bears closer resemblance to an airport. The pervasive feeling is that we are to be carried away as were the humans in the “How to serve man” episode of the Twilight Zone.

The only indicator of a dream state reality here is the flexibility of time, not only the fluctuation of duration, but also of continuity.

I’ve gotten on the train and started my long voyage to nowhere, but now I’m back in the station and have time for this question: is it better to go along, hoping I will be part of the small percentile that will survive, as my grandparents did the first Holocaust? Or should I join the “underground” (my Cineculture provides the certainty that there is necessarily an “underground”), risk fighting my way out, risk certain death. It is more a moral question. Should I go along and hope for the best or do I have an obligation to contest and fight, though facing a swifter more immediate death?

The dream then dissolves into random pornography and I wake up bathed in sweat.

What troubles me is the sense of impending doom, that it is really going to happen.

What troubles me is that the United States are acting like a Nazi Germany of the 21st century.

The current American government does not want to expand America’s Lebensraum, it wants to ensure uniform thought, which is a lot scarier.